On Sept. 20, Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 976, otherwise known as the Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act. Brought forth by State Senator Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), the bill prohibits online platforms from knowingly providing an "addictive feed" to a minor without parental consent. The bill also prohibits social media platforms from sending minors notifications during school hours and late night hours.
The bill defines "addictive feed" as an online website, service, application or mobile application "in which multiple pieces of media generated or shared by users are recommended, selected, or prioritized for display to a user based on information provided by the user, or otherwise associated with the user or user’s device."
Notifications will become unlawful between the hours of 12am and 6am in the user’s local time zone, and between the school hours of 8am and 3pm. Monday-Friday from September-May.
These regulations will not go into effect until January 1, 2027, in order to make time for likely court challenges from opposition groups.
"Every parent knows the harm social media addiction can inflict on their children - isolation from human contact, stress and anxiety, and endless hours wasted late into the night," Gov. Newsom said. "With this bill, California is helping protect children and teenagers from purposely designed features that feed their destructive habits. I thank Senator Skinner for advancing this important legislation that puts children’s well-being first."
Also thanking the Senator and Governor are a group of parents from across the state, including locally. One of SB 976’s advocates was Parent Collective Inc., a troupe of parents whose children have been impacted by the harms of social media.
The organization’s CEO, Sam Chapman, has been at the forefront of social media addiction bill advocacy since the death of 16-year-old son Sammy Chapman in February 2021 in his Santa Monica home. Chapman was solicited by a drug dealer via Snapchat, with a dealer giving the New Roads School student a fentanyl-laced bill he believed was Xanax.
"We’ve been raising the temperature here in California, parents like me and my fellow social media safety parent leaders have been doing television [appearances] and articles and speaking to schools and law enforcement, and then asking them to contact the governor," Chapman said.
Chapman added that his role "is to put a human face" to social media pitfalls in meetings with lawmakers, so that "they understand that this is not just an academic exercise" and that "there are real lives on the line."
The bill was not without opposition, as organizations such as TechNet, a national network of technology CEOs and senior executives, urged a "no" vote. The company stated that SB 976 "effectively requires" social media platforms to institute a chronological feed without any input of what a user wants to see, and that the bill is a "de facto requirement" for user age verification.
With the bill contested, Chapman said that California Attorney General Rob Bonta putting his support behind it was the "fulcrum" allowing it to pass to Newsom’s desk.
"We’ve been working on this for several years, and so the opposition was for sure there and keeping it from going through until this time … the opposition was winning until this year," Chapman said. "I think things have just built up in the media, and in particular around the country, we parents have become a political force … it’s an incredible group of people who care about the kids, who already lost their own and are doing this to help others and make sure they they don’t have to feel the way we all feel."
Two interesting subplots to the bill are farther down the text, both aimed at accountability. The bill specifically states that parental consent to use an online service or application would not waive or "serve as a defense to" any harm "to the mental health of well-being of the user."Later on, it states that operators of these services and platforms must annually disclose the number of minors using them.
On the notifications, Chapman noted that schools that forbid phones see more attentive and less anxious students, and eventually, better academic performance. A September 2023 report by Common Sense Media stated that teenagers receive a median of 273 phone notifications per day, with nearly 25% of them coming during school hours.
Chapman put his words not just behind ending notifications, but finding a way to remove phones from the school environment altogether, like how his son Sammy had to check his phone into a cubby all day at New Roads. Similar questions are currently being posed for Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, with talks on a districtwide phone policy expected to take place later this fall.
"These algorithms have intentionally addicted our children, so they’re sent to school with an addiction in their pocket," Chapman said. "They’re young, and they’re expected to somehow avoid that addiction and it’s not really fair or reasonable. The adults are sort of screwing them, and so we [have] to take control. I’m glad this is happening, it feels like the right thing to do."
Chapman is also currently pushing for the aptly-named Sammy’s Law, H.R. 5778, currently submitted in the United States Congress. On the state level, Sammy’s Law is known as SB 1444, but it was held up in the state’s Appropriations Committee this year. The bill will be resubmitted in January when the next legislative session begins.
thomas@smdp.com
